Shame (26 page)

I knocked on the door of the trailer, which rattled in the frame as always, then listened intently. Nothing. “Phillip,” I called. “Phillip, it's me. John. I just want to talk to you.”

Nothing.

I wedged the letter in between the doorknob and the doorjamb, where he couldn't go in or out without it coming to his attention, if only in the form of a falling slab of paper that he intended to ignore, and headed on to my next delivery.

Michael's truck sat crossways in the yard in front of his and Gloria's place, although I knew that meant nothing, since his welding job was right around the corner and he could walk to work. I repeated the same hailing procedure, adding Gloria's name for good luck, invoked the spirit of Christmas, even said I had presents for him (which was a blatant lie, since I intended to make him come out to the farm if he had any thoughts of collecting, although he had no way of knowing that).

Silence.

I opened the metal flap to the mail slot with a grating
creak
and slid the letter into another place I could not enter myself.

Story of my life.

At last I pulled up in front of Samantha's house on Prouty Street and sat for a moment looking up and down the street at the familiar houses, wondering, now that it was too late, who might see me parked out there. With any luck, in thirty seconds I might be back in my truck and headed to practice a little early. As I walked up to the front door, I resolved to take advantage of my extra time by shooting a thousand free throws—I'd been uncomfortable with my shot ever since I hurt my ankle—and then maybe a hundred three-pointers before the other guys got there.

That was my plan. But lo, I knocked the third time, and the door was opened unto me.

“Johnny,” Samantha said, and the sound of my old name in her mouth almost made my knees give beneath me. She saw the letter in my hands and smiled. “Mailman?”

“Herald,” I said, and held the letter out to her.

“Come on in,” she said. “You had lunch yet?”

“No,” I said.

“Let me fix you something.” She took my hand and pulled me inside, or at least so it seemed to me later when I thought about it; surely I hadn't passed so easily over the threshold on my own accord. She led me through the sitting room, past that same lumpy plaid sofa where we used to fearfully explore each other late at night after her parents thought I had gone home, then on into the kitchen, where she sat me down at the table in her father's place. “I hope you're not sick of turkey.”

“Haven't had any yet,” I said, and turned in my chair to see her better.

I watched as she pulled some leftovers out of the fridge, arranged them on a plate, and put them into the microwave. Over the whine of it heating, she said, “You know, somebody's bound to see your truck out there.”

“Maybe so,” I said.

“Are you prepared to accept that possibility?”

“I don't know what I'm ready to accept,” I said. The sight of her brought physical pain, an angry tug deep in the core of my being. “You look great,” I said when she caught me staring. I shook my head. “I can't believe how great you look.”

“Oh, please,” she said, although she was not displeased. The oven beeped and she brought my plate over—turkey and dressing, green beans, broccoli—and set it down over my shoulder.

“I can think better,” I said as she hovered over me, “if you sit down.”

She pulled up the chair to my right and settled in facing me. She opened and scanned the note I'd brought, then looked up at me. “Okay, Johnny. What does this mean?”

I speared some broccoli and avoided her eyes for the moment. “Why did you leave Bill?”

“I asked first.”

“I need your answer to give you mine.” I finished chewing and waited on her.

“I've been in love with you since I lost my first tooth,” she said. “You remember that?”

I did—first or second grade, out on the playground. I helped her pull it. She was crying, and then the tiny piece of porcelain was in my hand, my fingers smeared with her blood, red and sticky, and she stopped crying and smiled, a smile with a hole in it, and that was when Samantha Mathis crawled inside my heart and took up residence. “I remember.”

“I think I loved Bill, too, or I learned to. He's not you, but he's a good man, in his own way. But he got so caught up in other things, and after the girls were born, he wouldn't pay attention to me. I tried to get his attention. I tried all kinds of things.”

She glanced up at me to try to judge what I knew of these attempts, but I just nodded solemnly, as if to say,
It doesn't matter
.

“I'm not getting any younger,” she said. “I want to be happy.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “And I think I could be happy with you.”

There it was: The promise of joy and the threat of despair. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. I looked up from my plate. “How can we possibly be happy if we make so many people unhappy?”

She put her hand on my arm. “I've got it all figured out, Johnny. We could go to Idaho. I've got an old friend who has a real estate agency in Boise. He says things are booming up there. Even if they aren't, I could sell houses right and left. I'm a good realtor.”

“I don't doubt that,” I said. The pressure of her hand and the wafting scent of her perfume were making me a little dizzy. “But what would your friend think about you showing up with me in your hip pocket?”

I had that relationship right. She admitted, “He knows about you. I've told him.”

“And what would I do there while you sold houses? Raise potatoes?”

“Anything you want,” she said. “I have some money, and I'll make more. You're not a farmer, Johnny. You could do anything. Or nothing. You could just be. Read. Ski. Go to classes. Learn to paint. Write. You've worked hard enough. Long enough.”

A picture of myself on skis in an artist's smock flashed before my eyes. But I couldn't imagine Idaho. “Why so far away?”

She looked at me and smiled sadly. “Why would I want to stay close? You know neither of us will be able to show our faces in this town again. No one will talk to me now, and I'm not even a divorcée yet.” She saw the expression on my face, which might have been terror, and said, kindly but firmly, “Johnny, you can't have any false hopes about things working out to everyone's satisfaction. Everybody can't be happy. This is either/or.” She tapped the envelope on the table. “If I read this letter right, you're tired of living in between. You'll have to make a choice, not count on life to make it for you.”

“I know,” I said. “But imagine what people will think.”

“I don't have to imagine,” she said. “I know.” She took my hand in between her two hands, squeezed it.

I looked down at my hand, the touch buzzing like a hive filled with bees. Maybe that would be enough—the jolt, the sensation.

Maybe love would keep us together, as the Captain and Tennille used to say.

What they would think was that they'd been right about me all along, that I had never really become a responsible citizen, a good man. Imagining the crushing moral force of all that condemnation made my heart pound, and I could feel my stomach knotting into a coil. “Sam … Sam, doesn't it scare you to be talking this way? To talk about turning our lives upside down, the lives of everyone around us?”

She shook her head again; she was as calm as I was freaked out. “This is maybe our last chance to set things right. To live our lives the way they always should have been.”

When you hear your own thoughts and arguments coming from the mouth of someone else, it's amazing how persuasive they sound.

“Sam,” I said, pushing my uneaten food away from me and covering the hand on my arm with my own. “Sam, don't you worry that we'll … I don't know, go to hell or something if we do something like this? That at the very least, we'll be punished?”

“I worry about what people will think,” she said. “But I worry more about what we will think.”

“You don't think God has an opinion about husbands who leave their wives?”

“Johnny,” she said, sighing, “if there is a God, I don't have the slightest idea what He thinks. He's never bothered to share His opinions with me.”

“I've got to get up to the school,” I said, getting to my feet and setting my napkin across my plate. “I'm late. They'll be waiting for me to open up the gym.”

“Think about it,” she said, taking my hand again. “Will you just think about it? Twenty years ago, you would have jumped at the chance to run away with me.”

“I can't stop thinking about it,” I told her.

We walked back through the living room, and she paused by the couch and said, “Do you know how many times I've wished you'd gotten me pregnant instead of her? As scared as we were back then that it could happen, we would have been okay, wouldn't we?”

“It would have changed some things,” I said slowly. “But not everything. Who you marry is only one part of happiness.”

“Still, I wish it'd been me,” she said. “Johnny, why did you go to Michelle that night? Why couldn't you wait for me to come back?”

I opened my mouth to defend myself for the hundredth time, but I saw that her eyes were rimmed with tears, that I was not the only one carrying the ancient hurt, and I had to swallow a lump that had formed in my throat before I could answer. “I'm sorry,” I told her, again. “You know I didn't plan things to be this way.”

We had reached the door. She brought her lips up toward mine, but I turned my head, accepted only a kiss on my cheek and a hug that brought her body into uncomfortably close proximity.

“Think about it,” she whispered. “Please think about it.”

“I will,” I said, as though I hadn't been all along. All day, every day. “I'll see you soon.”

And I hurried out to the truck and on to the gym, where my teammates were indeed waiting, their engines running, for me to get there and let them in.

“About time,” Bobby Ray said as he and Oz crowded into the gym behind me. “Where you been?”

Bill Cobb followed us in silently. I nodded greetings, and he may have given me the barest nod in return.

Or maybe not.

“Todd Culpepper said he'd play with us,” Bobby Ray said, referring to one of the senior subs on the '75 team. “He's supposed to get into town tonight. But he says not to expect too much. Says the years have not improved his shot.”

“We'll run him at small forward,” I said. “In the meantime, maybe we could do some shooting, get warmed up.”

“Okay,” Oz said. Like the rest of us—except for Bill, who was wearing our new team warm-ups that simply unsnapped and fell around your ankles—he was sitting in the bleachers pulling his sweats off over tennis shoes.

We grabbed a couple of balls and went down to the west goal to shoot and rebound for each other. We talked a little about the holiday, about presents gotten and given, about family visiting or vamoosed—all except Bill, who shot in silence from the free throw line, one free throw after another, while the rest of us threw up three-pointers and put back misses from down near the basket.

“How are the girls?” I asked him, but he just turned a cold eye on me and said, “Why don't you worry about your own family?”

“Hey, easy, hoss,” Bobby Ray said, stepping toward and between us. “We're just wondering how things are. We know it's a tough time.”

“Tell him,” and he meant me, although he didn't so much as look at me, just twirled the ball in front of him as he got ready to shoot another free throw, “tell him to keep out of my business and away from my wife.”

Now Oz moved beside Bobby Ray. “Bill, I know this is—”

“He was there,” Bill said. “Today. At her house,” and now he turned to look at me, his expression ugly with anger, and I thought he was going to bounce that ball off my face. “If she'd known what he really is, she'd have forgotten about him years ago. But she can't see.”

“What can't she see?” I asked, moving closer to him. And watching that ball. “Tell me, Bill. You've always been an insightful kind of guy. I'd like to hear about myself.”

Bobby Ray and Oz began to look distinctly uncomfortable as each of us stepped closer to them.

“She can't see anything except the kid she grew up with.” We were just feet apart now. “Not the grown-up failure who never got out of town.”

“Failure,” I said. It was one thing for me to think that; it was another for Bill Cobb to say it. I could sense heat rising on the back of my neck, imagine the crimson rushing up into my cheeks, feel the tension as my jaw clamped tight. Now Bobby Ray raised his hands and waved them like he was trying to stop traffic, and I assumed Oz was doing something equally futile at his end.

“You've never amounted to anything,” Bill said, tossing the basketball to one side and pointing his finger at me—if not for our two friends, we'd have been face-to-face now, or worse. “And you never will, John. You never even went to college. You can't do anything. You're a failure. A nothing.” I heard the ball bounce twice, three times, roll against the bleachers behind me.

I let out a laugh, and it was not a pretty sound. “Bill,” I said, “you're not smart enough to recognize a failure when he stares at you from the mirror every morning. I don't believe you can even
spell
failure.” I raised a finger to his face. “What do you call a man who can't keep his family together? Who can't keep his wife happy? Who doesn't even know how much it would have meant to her if he'd ever asked her to dance?”

Well, that hit something. Bill shoved Oz and Bobby Ray, who tumbled over me like water over a dam, and I went down beneath them—and wouldn't you know it, a sharp pain shot up my leg again. I let out a groan and tried to push my friends off of me.